ISABELLA DUCROT: "Tendernesses"
STANDARD (OSLO)
PRESS RELEASE
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ISABELLA DUCROT:
"TENDERNESSES"
06.05.2022-04.06.2022 / PREVIEW: FRIDAY 06.05.2022 / 19.00-21.00
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The house of Isabella Ducrot is filled with curiosity, generosity and hospitality. There are paintings of the Italian baroque mixed with Indian miniature paintings, antiques and Alvar Aalto furniture next to each other, flowers everywhere and a terrace filled with roses. And there is the most genuine feeling of being welcome. And the same feeling that any question regarding what is what in this house is welcome. These questions are not only given an answer, but a full story of how and when any one of these things came into her house and her life during these first 91 years spent on earth.
When meeting last month, she told me with particular fondness about the Italian painters of earlier yeas that had gone undiscovered and hence had been able to afford and add to her collection. I mentioned the painter Lorenzo Lotto, and how he only in recent years he had come into awareness and appreciation. "I love Lorenzo Lotto", she confessed but also confessed to never have been able to secure a work of his. "You know, his portraits never leave the people looking beautiful." I nodded and mentioned the portrait of the young man posing in front of the curtain - dating back to 1508 that is now hanging in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna - that has Lotto enhancing each and every imperfection of the young man. Brutally, Lotto directs our attention to the young man's long nose, the wart on his forehead, and his sleepy eyes that forever has him looking at his viewers with great disengagement.
"Lorenzo Lotto paints us who we are", she said. All the things we are. All the follies, flaws and imperfections that we have. All the feelings that we lay bare. That is also what comes to show in Isabella Ducrot's series of "Tendernesses" that came into being during the two past years of the pandemic. She would make the short stroll around the corner from her house to her studio, and would repeatedly be painting portraits of people embracing. During this time of isolation, when we were not allowed to touch or allowed to be together, Ducrot depicted couples with all the emotions that have been kept at distance now suddenly were seeping through. Longing, caring, loving, lusting - fusing all that is compassion and passion. All the things we are but could not be (while the pandemic pressed pause on what civil life could be). The bodies in these paintings impatiently rushing towards each other, intertwining, making a mosaic of garments and patterns, yet making up one singular torso. How hastily and hectically we all urged to be human again. And be together again. And to be all that we are in the way that Ella Fitzgerald sang in "All The Things You Are":
"The dearest things I know are what you are
Someday my happy arms will hold you
And someday
I'll know that moment divine
When all the things you are, are mine"
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Isabella Ducrot, born in Naples in 1931, is an Italian artist and author who is living and working in Rome. Previous exhibitions include: Museo Carlo Bilotti Aranciera di Villa Borghese, Rome; Biennale Internazionale Donna,Trieste; Fondazione Dino ed Ernesta Santarelli, Rome (2021); Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna et Contemporanea, Rome (2016); Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples; Nazionale Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome (2015); Museo Michetta, Francavilla al Mare (2010); City University of New York, New York (2008), as well as numerous gallery exhibitions with Galerie Capitain, Cologne and T293, Rome.
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Installation photography: Vegard Kleven
